Breaking trail on Highway 99

HIGHWAY FROM HELL Making your way along what would become Highway 99 in the early days required ropes and four-wheel drive.

If you've ever taken a look at the Whistler Museum's YouTube channel you might have seen a short film from the Petersen Film Collection that features the drive to Whistler in 1958.

The footage makes it clear that the drive was an interesting one, full of steep hills, narrow roads and bumpy track. At one point the car obviously overheated, a problem solved with the help of a nearby river.

The footage from the Petersens is only one account of coming to Whistler by car when the area was still known as Alta Lake. Another well-known figure in Whistler, Don MacLaurin, also made the journey up the "highway" in 1958.

At the time Don was working in the forestry service and was part of a cruising crew staying in Pemberton (cruising crews measure volume and quality of timber before it is harvested).

In a 2007 interview with John Hammons and Karen Overgaard, Don shared photos of his trip that are now part of the Whistler Museum archives. As Don recalled, it took "two crews, two land rovers, winches, prayers and eight hours to go from Squamish to Pemberton."

One photo shows a portion of the original road through the Cheakamus Canyon. When asked to describe the drive, Don's description was "precarious." The one-way road had a cliff on one side and, according to Don, "logs cabled through the road into the cliff ... trying to hold the road in."

Another photo shows a cable running back to a land rover. It was a good thing the crews had two, as one would frequently be used to pull the other out when stuck.

The road through what is now the Tapley's Farm neighbourhood (and at the time would have been around the actual Tapley's Farm) was "very, very wet and very soft and you were lucky to get through that as well."

Once past Alta Lake the crews still had to get past what they called "suicide hill," which was located "under the power lines on the railroad side of Green Lake when you made the descent back down to the Green River."

With a "so-called road" and "baseball-sized boulders," it's no wonder Don described that section as "very, very tricky." Despite these challenges, the crews did eventually make it to Pemberton.

This was not the first time Don had come through the Whistler valley. In 1951 he travelled through on the PGE on his way from Quesnel to Vancouver. By 1961, when he returned with Isobel and a couple of neighbours, there was still no dependable road, and certainly not one that could sensibly be used in the winter, so again they came by rail.

By 1964 visitors to Whistler could come along a gravel road called Highway 99. Two years later Highway 99 was paved from Squamish to Mons Station and to Pemberton in 1969. With changes made over the decades and work done prior to the 2010 Olympics, the road Don, the Petersens and others travelled in 1958 is almost unrecognizable as the road we travel today.